Post Tagged with: "hard work"

In a recent discussion (Nicolau), about the suggested move of Prof. NicoIau from Scripps, the issue of the practicality of natural product total synthesis was raised. Here is a wonderful example of just that very usefulness, a wonderful piece of science extending over many years. It concerns the journey from Halichondrin B to Eribulin (E7389) a novel anti-cancer drug. The two compounds have the following structures:

I think you can see the relationship and as a development chemist I am glad they managed to simplify things (a bit).

Both compounds have an enormous number of possible isomers: Halichondrin B, with 32 stereocenters has 232 possible isomers; Eribulin has 19 with 219 isomers (if I have counted correctly, it does not really matter, there are lots of isomers). Remarkable is the fact that only one of these isomers is active in the given area of anti-cancer agents.

An excellent review of the biology and chemistry of these compounds has been published by Phillips etal1. This review is an excellent read and is to be commended. Another one written by Kishi2, is also full of information about the discovery of E7389 and I hope you will all get a chance to read this chapter.

The history of Halichondrin B goes back to 1987 when Blunt2-5 isolated it with other similar compounds from extraction of 200Kg of a sponge. Independently Pettit isolated the same compound from a different species4. The appearance of this compound in different species of sponge may indicate that it is produced by a symbiote.

The biological activity of Halichondrin B is amazing. When evaluated against B-16 melanoma cells it was found to have an IC50 of 0.093ng/mL. Against various cancers, generated in mice, it was shown to be affective at a daily dose of 5ug/kg, which resulted in a doubling of the survival rate. It has also been demonstrated that Halichondrin acts as a microtubule destabiliser and mitoitic spindle poison. It was proven that it is has tremendous in vivo activity against a variety of drug resistant cancers, lung, colon, breast, ovarian to mention a few. Consequently the National Cancer Institute selected it for pre-clinical trials and it’s here that the problems began. According to reference 1 the entire clinical development would require some 10g, and if successful the annual production amount would be between 1-5 kg. Blunt and co-workers managed to isolate 310mg from 1000kg-harvested sponge therefore, the only way to obtain the amounts required is total chemical synthesis. But synthesising 1-5 kg of such a compound would indeed be a mammoth task.

Kishi synthesised this compound7 in 1992 starting from carbohydrate precursors employing the Nozaki-Hiyama-Kishi Ni/Cr reaction, several times, in the long synthetic sequence8, 9. Now as an aside I have used this reaction on scale several times and although it works well its success is very dependant upon the quality of the chromium source and also the presence of other trace transition metals.

In collaboration with Eisai work on the SAR of Halichondrin began. They had a good start: Thanks to the total syntheses of Kishi several advanced intermediates were available for biological screening and one popped out of the screen as being very active:

The first active lead compound

As one can see the complete left hand side of Halichondrin has gone! However, this compound was not active in vivo. Many derivatives and analogues of this compound were prepared: furans, diols, ketones and so on and a lead emerged from this complex SAR study, ER-076349. The vicinal diol was used as a handle for further refinement and lead ultimately to E7389, the clinical candidate.

It can be synthesised in around 35 steps from simple starting materials.

Going through all this work in a few sentences really belittles the tremendous amount of effort that went into discovery and development of this compound and the people involved are to be applauded for their dedication.

Kishi continues to optimise the synthesis of Eribulin as judged by a recent publication10. Where he describes an approach to the amino-alcohol-tetrahydrofuran part of Eribulin (top left fragment, compound 1 below). The retro-synthetic analysis is shown below. The numbering corresponds to that of Eribulin.

The first generation synthesis consisted of 20 steps and delivered compound 1 about 5% yield, the second-generation route was completed in 12 steps with a yield of 48%. One of the highlights includes a remarkable asymmetric hydrogenation11 with Crabtree’s catalyst12:

This selectivity was not just luck; it seems to quite general, at least in this system. I always wonder how long it took them to stumble across this catalyst, but then I suppose that Eisai like most of the large pharma. companies has a hydrogenation group that probably indulges in catalyst screening.

The C34-C35 diol was obtained by a Sharpless asymmetric hydroxylation, here the diastereoisomeric ratio was not very high, only about 3:1 in favour of the desired isomer. Fortunately the undesired isomer could be removed completely by crystallisation.

This is a remarkable story and references 1 and 2 are worth reading to obtain the complete picture and learn lots of new chemistry as well. Eisai filed a NDA and the FDA approved the compound in 2010 for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer.

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